Due to the increasing popularity of digital video and its availability for playback on computing devices, various hardware and software video encoders and decoders (generally, codecs) have been developed. The variety of available video codecs can perform at different performance levels—some codecs perform better than others in particular circumstances. In some cases, video codecs can perform differently on different computing systems due to factors such as the system setup, the quality or complexity of the video being processed, or the resources of the system. Due to the increased availability of video codecs, a computing system can have multiple video codecs available for video processing. For example, a computing system can have both software and hardware decoders (and/or encoders) that can provide a desired processing of video data. Although such computing systems can have multiple video codecs available to process video data, such computing system can have limited performance due to the variability of video codec performance.